Electaarchitettura is publishing the first monograph to systematically presents the series of exhibition displays designed by Guicciardini & Magni Architetti. The volume brings together a detailed overview of 26 of the major temporary and permanent exhibitions, designed and created by the office over the last 25 years, enriched with useful documentary apparatuses, starting with the complete list of works.
Since 1990 Guicciardini & Magni have designed some seventy museum exhibitions (forty have been built) and as many temporary exhibitions, in Italy and abroad. They cover a broad range of themes, from archaeology to contemporary art, industrial design to classical art, and from ethnography to fashion.
The Giotto exhibition, staged in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence in 2001 and shortly after the exhibition In Terrasanta (2000) at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, still maintains the record for attendance numbers for temporary exhibitions in Italy. Outstanding among their subsequent exhibition designs were I marmi vivi. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (2009) at the Bargello in Florence, Il Tessuto è tutto (2012) and Gianfranco Ferré (2014) at the Museo del Tessuto di Prato, Omaggio a Giovanni Pisano (2017) in Pistoia and Ambrogio Lorenzetti (2017-18) at Santa Maria della Scala in Siena.

The museums where they have worked on exhibition design, often together with their restoration, include the Museo del Tessuto (2002-03) in Prato, the Museo Galileo (2007-10) and the Museo dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore (2009-15) in Florence (both with Adolfo Natalini), the Museo Diocesano (2014-17) in Volterra and the Polo Culturale dei Bottini dell’Olio (2012-18) in Livorno.

Currently the office is working on a broad spectrum of sites ranging from the restoration and construction of the Museo dell’Opera Primaziale in Pisa to the restoration and creation of the Topkapi Palace Museum collections in Istanbul, the preparation of the National Museum for Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo and the galleries of the Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu in Paris.

In this way, in one of their fields of activity, Guicciardini & Magni Architetti’s are renewing an outstanding tradition of 20th-century Italian architecture, exhibition design (from Albini to BBPR, from Scarpa to Castiglioni, to mention only some of the many), capable of combining the restoration of historic buildings with a refined ability to exhibit artistic or utilitarian artefacts.